The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Praise

“The Afro-Latin@ Reader is impressive in scope and as an edited volume it succeeds because it is able to address varying topics and cover many different Afro groups without sacrificing quality. It is therefore recommended.” — Kwame Dixon, Bulletin of Latin American Research

“The Afro-Latin@ Reader is an impressive collection of accessible primary and secondary texts that moves the struggles and contributions of Afro-Latina/os from the margins of African American, Latina/o, and American studies to the center.” — Erin Hurt and Cherise A. Pollard, MELUS

“The breadth and style of The Afro-Latin@ Reader will appeal most to readers attracted to scholarship. But while its content is dense and deeply analytical, The Afro-Latin@ Reader has something for everyone. Jiménez and Flores make the case that Afro-Latinos as a colectividad provide a link between the African- American and Hispanic communities.” — Amanda Hess, Grassroots Development

“This volume’s greatest strength is that it brings the wealth of scholarship on Afro-Latinos in the United States together in one place; in doing so it provides a unique and thorough survey text for undergraduate use. It provides new insights for scholars as our understanding of the US racial order is contested and redefined.” — Shawn Alfonso Wells, Hispanic American Historical Review

“Uncommonly inclusive and all-encompassing, its scholarly heft and solidity thus sympathetically alert and impressively coupled to the emotionally expressive verve, revelatory force, and persuasive authority of the autobiographical. The Afro-Latin@ Reader is, in sum, an extraordinary and exceptional achievement. A splendid contribution to the field it here so ably moves forward, it admirably also advances, more fully and fruitfully than any single comparable volume on the subject has so far done, its readers' knowledgeably complex, non-reductive understanding of Afro-Latin® America's contemporary emergence and, above all, how regularly—where, when, by whom, and why—Afro-Latin@s have ‘been rendered invisible and silent because they simply do not fit larger historical narratives of immigration, race, gender, culture and location in the United States.’” — Roberto Márquez, Centro Journal

“[R]equired reading for all Latinos. . . . This important reader provides critical information from a wide variety of approaches on the evolution and current realities of Black Latinos and Latinas. From poetic to musical to social scientific sources, this is a powerful 360-degree treatment of the subject.” — Angelo Falcón, National Institute for Latino Policy Book Notes

“As a collection of pieces, many of which have been published previously, The Afro-Latin@ Reader ultimately serves as a compact archive of materials from various academic disciplines and creative genres that details the Afro-Latina/o experience in the United States. . . . The Afro-Latin@ Reader makes accessible to students, scholars, and the general public a virtually ignored set of important contributions, not only to the study of Afro-Latina/os, but to the discourse about race in the United States more generally.” — Petra R. Rivera, Transition

“The collected works in The Afro-Latin@ Reader broaden definitions of blackness and latinidad and reveal the multiple ways in which Afro-Latino/as navigate national and cultural histories that have consistently denigrated or dismissed their African heritage and challenge US racial classifications that dismiss their cultural background and linguistic difference. The Afro-Latin@ Reader invites us to move beyond a binary understanding of racial identity and to embrace the allegiances that may be forged and, in many instances, have been forged among Afro-Latino/as, Latinos/as, African Americans, and other underrepresented groups in the US.” — Sobeira Latorre, Anthurium: A Caribbean StudiesJournal

“This exciting collection is a great resource for anyone interested in Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, or American Studies.” — Jenell Navarro, Women’s Studies

“The Afro-Latin@ Reader assembles in one place an extraordinary range of articles, chapters, and first-person accounts of Afro-Latin@ identity. These pieces show that explorations of Afro-Latin@ identities quickly reveal significant hidden histories of racialization, colonization, exploitation, and social mobilization. They complicate our understanding of the U.S. racial order and its complex systems of inclusion and exclusion. This collection is a much-needed addition to scholarship in ethnic studies.” — George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger

“The Afro-Latin@ Reader is a superb collection, one that I cannot wait to use in my own courses. For some time now, scholars have engaged the history and anthropology of Black populations in Latin America, but the scholarship on the Afro-Latin@ presence (as configured on this side of the Rio Grande) has been more episodic and, to some extent, under-theorized. The breadth of The Afro-Latin@ Reader, as well as its effort to actually define the entire field, makes it a unique scholarly contribution.” — Ben Vinson III, co-author of African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean

Miriam Jiménez Román is a visiting scholar in the Africana Studies Program at New York University and Executive Director of afrolatin@ forum, a research and resource center focusing on Black Latin@s in the United States.

Juan Flores is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His most recent works include The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning, From Bomba To Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, and the English translation of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s book Cortijo’s Wake, also published by Duke University Press.